Priest Scandal News – defending the Pope, cleaning up seminaries

by Steve Ray on June 1, 2010

‘Future pope refused defrocking of convicted priest’http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=6492
In a manifest example of media bias, a May 30 Associated Press headline screamed, “Future pope refused defrocking of convicted priest”– even though Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, did not have the authority in 1989 to laicize a priest involuntarily. Instead, the future Pontiff asked the Diocese of Springfield to conduct a canonical trial that could lead to Father Alvin Campbell’s laicization. Three years later, when Father Campbell voluntarily sought his laicization, Cardinal Ratzinger granted his request– as the Church discipline of the time permitted him to do.

New York Times examines homosexuality, seminary admissionshttp://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=6493
A front-page story in the May 31 edition of The New York Times examined how vocations directors and seminaries are screening prospective seminarians in light of the Congregation for Catholic Education’s 2005 document that reaffirmed the Church’s longstanding discipline barring those with homosexual tendencies from ordination. “We have no gay men in our seminary at this time,” said a psychologist who screens prospective seminarians for the Diocese of Brooklyn.